September 25th - October 2nd

First week in and we have been told to get some preliminary ideas going with our worksheet 1. Here's what I came up with ( it has been annotated by Phillip Wharton);

Honours Project

Worksheet No.1

It is not a subeject I have any expertise in but I know this has been attempted several times before with various degrees of success. Please talk to H Fortuna before you complete your ws 2

Topic Of Interest:

• Audio

Investigation

• I would like to investigate which audio framework would be best to use for interactive and adaptive audio within a computer games environment. In other words a comparative study between the two frameworks of Direct Sound and FMOD.
• Note that compared to the FMOD library, DirectSound is considered to be a low level API, and thus you may have trouble comparing the two, perhaps look at OpenAL (free, cross-platform Audio API) and XACT (from Microsoft which is replacing DirectSound) as well/instead.

Initial Ideas

• I would like to come up with a game idea that would require interactive and adaptive audio (possibly even create a very simplistic representation of this game).

• Then using this idea either by myself or work with someone else to create the audio necessary for this game.

• Then use the game idea and audio to create a two working frameworks (specified in the fields above), in order to find out which one is optimum to use within a working game environment.

• What is your definition of optimum here? For programming consider: Ease of use, API functionality (i.e. What level of audio processing is available?), dependencies on platforms (e.g. DirectSound on Windows), use of hardware acceleration (See DirectSound3D on Vista), and ease of integration. For the end-user consider: Level of realism, clarity, output formats (2.0, 5.1 etc.) and reliance on hardware.

Overall, interesting idea which with further development may lead to a more immersive gaming experience for the end user (which is always a plus).

Annotated by Philip Wharton 0502636

To get this level of feedback at this early stage has really spurred me on to get some more research done into the area.